Amazon
And here's the last book Grandma Bonnie Peters just (finally) ordered from Amazon via a giftcard someone sent me:
Cybersecurity
I just investigated a site someone mentioned on Google +, and I'm certainly not going to link to upwork.com in a way that would suggest that anybody should consider using it. I want this site banned from the U.S. The effrontery! Without even posting the host company's physical address (although they just have a foreign smell) they would even allow any U.S. citizen to display his or her real name with his or her real photo online? That's handing that information to terrorists, and it should be BANNED! No real names in cyberspace. Not ever. Create a company name and stick to it.
Economy
Yougov.com recently polled U.S. respondents: "Do you like Mexican food? Would you be happy or unhappy if there was a taco truck on your corner?" Although 61% of respondents admit they like at least some Mexican food, only 58% wanted a taco truck on the corner. I sincerely hope that this means the other 42% were 100% happy with their current pretzel wagons! Seriously...my adoptive brother worked his way up from homelessness and disability, to being a federal contractor and convincing people back in India that he was still alive, by selling things on streetcorners. First he sold an armful of flowers, then he had a pretzel wagon, then a hot dog cart, then an ice cream truck, and then a restaurant in a federal office building. So I know firsthand that although the problems involved in keeping meat and dairy products sanitary in a truck are monumental, and I personally would stick to fruit, nuts, chips, and other vegetarian snacks in warm weather, streetcorner snack vending is a much better solution to many socioeconomic problems than welfare is. When you buy a snack from someone who would otherwise be poor, instead of handing him (very few women are tough enough to run snack wagons) some sort of tax-subsidized giftcard, along with your dollar or five dollars you're handing him respect and a way out of poverty.
End of rant. Anyway, if you weren't polled on this (more) important (than it initially looks) question and would like to have been, here is your link to join Yougov.com. (Both you and I get points that can be redeemed for a store giftcard if you use this specific link.)
https://today.yougov.com/refer/brglBv6yISldXGeAQbYXBg/
Food
As always with recipes that suggest melting cheese into something...try it without the cheese!
https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=98124
Tacos are also good without the cheese. If you don't have venison at the same time you have fresh lettuce and tomatoes, I'd say no problem...veg and spices are what really make tacos, for me.
https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=98412
Nice
Baby abandoned by single mother finds his vocation in this world.
http://www.dailygood.org/story/1389/the-uninvited-guest-of-this-universe-andrew-hinton/
From an old-style (leftish) liberal, favorable review of a child welfare hearing in which the judge did seem to be "thinking of the children" as individuals rather than a demographic:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016519.html
North Carolina
Prayers requested for the city of Charlotte. Note that despite the agitators howling about " #BlackLivesMatter " the policeman who shot the apparently armed Black man was also apparently a Black man.
Yesterday I spent some time mulling whether or not to link to a well written and informative article about bad cops at ysabetwordsmithlivejournal.com . I didn't have time to ask them, but felt that GBP and Adayahi wouldn't like it. (Long ago, Adayahi used to be a policeman.) While bad cops do exist, never let it be said that this web site fed any of this kind of paranoid insanity. This web site calls on everybody, on both sides, to calm down and show due respect to your neighbors. There are ways to demand justice in Tulsa. Committing atrocities in other places is not one of them.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/09/21/following-police-shooting-protesters-in-charlotte-temporarily-shut-interstate-injure-12-officers/?
Obamacare
Jason Pye would love to discuss, at length and in detail, how and why President Obama's lame-duck proposal to "fix" Obamacare by adding a "public option" would actually make things worse:
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/freedomworks-opposes-senate-democrats%E2%80%99-push-public-option
Pictures
Quaint old trains in England (thanks to Elizabeth Barrette for the link):
http://meridian-rose.dreamwidth.org/535679.html
Stories
Here's a bit of conceptual fiction with a wry twist. Everybody's read a story where the protagonist(s) stumble into a different world in order to have adventures that couldn't happen in our world, and get back to their own world at just the right time to supply a happy ending. What if they didn't get back?
http://charminglyantiquated.tumblr.com/post/149306615388/ex-heroes
Tulsa
Since I mentioned non-violent ways to demand justice in Tulsa...(If you've not already read the story and seen the video, you can do that at this page before signing the petition.) Online petitions to companies and local officials do work if people use them.
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/terence-crutcher-died?
Welfare
Speaker Paul Ryan's "Joseph Project" sounds similar to a Catholic-affiliated charity called SOME-CET, to which my husband and I used to donate one day a week in Washington. It was an excellent charity that did a lot of good for a lot of good people. In some parts of the U.S. "homeless" is all but synonymous with "hopelessly demented," but in Washington enough people become homeless just by being unable to meet rent increases that Mitch Snyder was able to base his adult career on the theory that "low-income or laid-off workers" are what "homeless" actually means. SOME-CET identified these mentally competent homeless people and offered them a "stipend" to attend classes, including G.E.D. prep, job skills, and "soft skills" classes, until they were placed in jobs.
http://www.freedomworks.org/content/opt-out-welfare
My observation was that this kind of program is about 200% better than welfare...even though it's still a large-scale, demographically planned, inflexible structure with cracks through which good people inevitably fall. We ended up leaving SOME-CET, although we continued to send them money, because we had that one student...Mrs. Jones was tough and intelligent and hardworking and a pillar of a church, and should have been earning a good salary for the ministry she was already carrying on, but even without the dyslexia she would have been too old to be hired as a receptionist. It became painful to watch her becoming bored, and thus scoring lower, on typing tests, while knowing that nature had designed her for a job that paid more than receptionists earned anyway. What I learned from Mrs. Jones was that even the best-intended, best-designed, most effective group programs are no substitute for just cutting the protectionist red tape and clearing the way for individuals to capitalize on their own talents.
And then I hit age forty, which is the age Mrs. Jones was when I knew her...and to Mrs. Jones, wherever she may be, I'd like to say that although I'm legally White, not overweight, with a fashionable middle-Atlantic accent rather than an unfashionable Alabama accent, I am now having just as much financial trouble as you were then. God bless you, my student and teacher whose real name happened to be "Mrs. Jones."
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